Getting Started With Azure
Do you know what is Azure? Do you have any idea why and how it is used? If you want the answers to these questions, you have landed at the right place. This will give you an introduction to Microsoft Azure covering all the aspects of it.
- Why Cloud Computing?
- What is Microsoft Azure?
- Azure Services
- Azure Pricing
- Azure Certifications
- What is Azure portal?
Why Cloud Computing?
10 years back, companies were storing everything in-house i.e on their own servers. But over the years with internet speed becoming better, people discovered a new way to store everything, the “Cloud” way! What is Cloud? To understand What is Cloud, let’s first understand why it came into the picture!
Before “Cloud”, companies were storing everything offline i.e hosting websites on their on-premise servers, and adding more servers whenever required. But, there were some problems with this kind of setup. What were these problems? Let’s discuss them using an example:
- You own a company which runs a very successful website and let’s imagine the “cloud concept” was not introduced at this time. Therefore your website was hosted on the on-premise servers.
- One fine day, you added a new feature to your website which became a hit overnight. Now, your traffic increased multi-folds and the inevitable happened, your website crashed!
- Well, you obviously couldn’t have seen this, and even if you did, there was no way you could have spent and bought the required servers, in such a short time. Why? Well, servers are not cheap guys, they are very VERY expensive.
What is Microsoft Azure?
A company which provides these cloud services is called a cloud provider. Now, there are a lot of cloud providers out there, one of them is Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform created by Microsoft which developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy and manage applications through their global network of data centers.
Azure Services
Microsoft Azure provides various services that would help you in computing in one way or the other and these services are clubbed into domains. Here are a few domains:
- Compute
It is used to process data on the cloud by making use of powerful processors which serve multiple instances at a time. - Storage Services
The storage as the name suggests is used to store data in the cloud with the ability to scale as and when required. This data can be stored anywhere. - Database
The database domain is used to provide reliable relational and non-relational database instances managed by Azure. - Networking
It lets you connect to the cloud and on-premise infrastructure and services to get a great user experience
Azure Pricing
This might easily be one of the most popular reasons to learn Microsoft Azure and also use it. For people who are new and want to learn about the technology, Azure provides you free Credits which can be used to access Azure services for free for a short duration. This is sufficient to get one started.
Azure is extremely flexible and offers a pay-as-you-go approach which can greatly help serve your business needs. Flexible pricing greatly supports up-scaling or down-scaling the architecture as per the needs.
This was about Azure pricing. Now, let us continue with this and discuss what kind of Certifications Azure has to offer?
Azure Certifications
Microsoft Azure aims to fill in the skill gap between the industry requirement and the resources available and to do that they have taken the following measures:
- Introduce Roles Based Certifications
- Provide Aligned Experience
- Make Certifications simple and discoverable
- Have more industry recognition to the certifications offered
In the process the have classified Azure Certifications into three major categories, which are:
- Azure Administrator
- Azure Developer
- Azure Solutions Architect
These certifications have levels where one has to first get an associate level certification and then use it as a stepping stone for Advanced level certification.
What Is Azure Portal?
Azure Portal as the name suggests is a single portal or a single junction that lets you access and manage all your applications at one place. It lets you build, manage and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud applications in a single, unified console.
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